Paper wealth isn't wealth. Yet.

The three years before a liquidity event are the most consequential planning window of a founder's career. Stock valuations are still reasonable, SLAT and GRAT structures can be funded at low gift-tax cost, state residency can be established, and charitable vehicles can be set up before capital gains crystallize. Most founders miss this window, not because the strategies are obscure, but because the advisor they have wasn't hired for this job.

We begin pre-exit planning with a full inventory of your equity position, your likely exit pathway (acquisition, IPO, secondary, tender), and your personal liquidity needs through the transaction. From there we construct a sequenced plan: what to do now, what to do six months before, what to do at signing, what to do at close. Pre-exit planning is not a single strategy. It is a coordinated sequence of moves across tax, estate, investment, and personal architecture.

The 83(b) election is one event inside a longer equity-planning arc. Its downstream effects touch AMT, QSBS, trust strategy, and later exercise decisions.

We review founder equity documents across rounds and inflection points so restricted stock, options, tenders, and later sales stay coordinated rather than being optimized piecemeal.

Section 1202 of the tax code offers one of the largest single benefits available to American founders: up to 100% exclusion of capital gains on qualified small business stock held for more than five years, capped at the greater of $10 million or 10× basis. The details matter. Incorporation timing, asset thresholds at issuance, active business requirements, and the five-year clock all determine whether the benefit survives the transaction.

We review your QSBS eligibility at every stage: founding, financing rounds, secondary sales, and pre-exit. We also coordinate QSBS stacking strategies using non-grantor trusts to multiply the exclusion across family members, a legitimate technique that requires careful structuring and timely execution.

Partial liquidity is not just a cash event. It is a tax event, an estate-planning event, and often the right moment to reset concentration strategy and personal reserves.

We help founders decide whether to sell, how much to sell, from which lots, and how the retained equity should reshape the rest of the household plan.

After liquidity, the planning work changes shape. The question becomes how to redeploy capital without recreating concentration risk or retreating so far into cash that the portfolio stops compounding.

We build post-exit portfolios around liquidity reserves, public-market exposure, and optional carve-outs for private markets, real estate, and angel activity where those fit the next chapter.

A founder's risk profile is unlike anyone else's. You hold a concentrated equity position that is simultaneously your largest asset and the operating instrument of the company you run. Your personal liability is shaped by your board seat, your founder status, and the signatures you've put on financing documents. Your income is modest relative to your net worth, which means your disability coverage needs to be sized to what you will earn, not what you do. And the insurance products that a conventional advisor would recommend, whole life, indexed universal life, and retail disability, are rarely calibrated to founder economics at all.

We diagnose the real exposures: D&O and personal liability from board and officer roles, with attention to how the company's D&O policy actually protects, or doesn't protect, the individual. Disability coverage sized to post-exit expected earnings, with own-occupation provisions and appropriate benefit periods. Umbrella liability scaled to the net worth you're likely to hold after a liquidity event, not the one on your tax return today. Key-person insurance for the company and life insurance for the household sized to replace what the exit was expected to deliver. Most founders we meet are either dramatically under-insured for the actual economic loss or still paying for whole-life policies that were sold to them in their 20s and no longer fit. We rebalance the coverage to match the actual exposure. That usually reduces total premium in the process.

Founders often get financing advice from the people who are paid when a deal happens. We are not compensated by the transaction, which changes the conversation.

We help founders think through dilution, runway, investor mix, and the personal consequences of each financing decision long before those choices show up in a closing binder.

Some of the most consequential founder decisions do not fit neatly inside tax or portfolio work: unsolicited offers, cofounder changes, recap choices, and whether to keep building or sell.

Our role is not to dictate the answer. It is to bring frameworks, pattern recognition, and a balance-sheet view of the consequences while the decision is still open.